Salesforce created an amazing Social Media style social tool to bring the aspect of Social Media into your Salesforce platform. For the last month or so I have come to a better understanding of just how powerful a tool Chatter truly is. Chatter at its most basic form is to encourage users to connect and interact over record types and feeds especially if they work in different offices. By using Chatter in the most basic form you can follow important records and get updates on work flows without having to send emails back and forth. Chatter was started with the intent to help reduce death by email which many of organizations experience daily.

As an administrator I have started to create and build what we call Chatter Actions that go above and beyond just the social aspect of Chatter. It allows for record updating without having to do a constant scroll down a record type to update fields especially in regards to opportunities and how pipeline items are constantly needing to be updated through their sales process. Actions can be built to update specific fields without having to scroll and edit the full record page and click save. Actions can eliminate a couple of steps you have to take when typically updating a record.

Actions not only work on the regular platform but also translate beautifully to the Salesforce1 mobile app. If you are a company eagerly using the mobile app to use Salesforce especially on the road Chatter Actions and Global Actions can be used and seen easily in the mobile app without any problems. This allows you to update a record while out of the office by using a simplified layout in the publisher action rather than trying to scroll and update on a mobile device which is not always easy to do on a smartphone.

You are probably wondering what my point is? My point is a good majority of companies see Chatter at the basic onset and think this is only a social tool that their employees might use like AOL Aim for personal chatting that may not be business related. You may look at it as an interesting way to get updates on important records and interact with potential SME’s within your own company for information sharing but not much that could or would impact your business processes directly. I beg to differ, take a moment to dive into what Chatter Actions can do and you may find that this social media tool can not only improve your business processes but increase your user adoption. Your users will find their work flow to be faster and easier allowing them to save time which means you (the Company as a whole and the Boss) save money. I think that translates to a win-win situation so why not try it out? I bet if done correctly you will become a Chatter Action Champion.